I know that this is a troll, and I usually don't respond to stuff like this, but this is a good example of the thinking that permeates much of academia. The idea crudely presented in the post above is that if I'm not deeply offended by the book and 100% behind some goofy letter to the editor or petition or other feel-good measure, then I must be a racist Republican, incapable of thinking and fueled by propaganda. It's the exact same mindset that Bush's, "You're either with us, or against us," comes from. Logic and reason are meaningless, I'm either on the team or I'm a dehumanized enemy.
It's why I unconsciously started my initial comment by stating my personal disagreement with the book (which is genuine), even though that fact is tangential to my entire argument. If I weigh in on some news here at the University without first explicitly stating that I'm not a [racist|sexist|whateverist], the focus of any dissenting comment shifts from what I actually say to assumptions about my politics because I'm not parroting the right talking points.
Who the fuck are you to say which response is correct?
A scientist, who realizes that science is based on reason and not emotion.
This response is covered in Science (though submitted to the NYTimes as a book review) and signed by scientists who are making an "argument" from authority and by consensus. The letter starts, "As scientists..." and then makes an unsupported argument that their work was misused. It concludes by assuming that their "full agreement", by itself and without any actual arguments, carries any weight at all.
By what criteria is that a correct response in any way besides as a feel-good statement? What exactly does being offended do to advance science and human knowledge?
While I don't agree with this guy's conclusions myself, this type of hyper-PC bullshit storm is why being in academia is so obnoxious. Science should be determined by the evidence available and the best interpretation of it at the time, not by people's feelings or politics.
Secondly, someone citing your work doesn't mean you agree with their conclusions (or especially their politics). The correct response, if you care enough, is to follow up by pointing out where their interpretation falls short. The incorrect response is to write some whiny letter crying about how seemingly racist conclusions were drawn from your publications and it deeply offends you.
I mean, come on: "We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures." What a pathetic retort. But I bet they feel better now, and that's all that really matters.
It's one reason why I can't rally behind Phil Zimmerman, as much as I like PGP and appreciate much of what he's done. His insistence on keeping security software secretive and closed source, while seeming to understand the concept of trust, is baffling.
That it's an undesirable situation is the point. The availability of H1B workers is a construct of US laws and the point of US laws should be to benefit the citizens of the US and the country itself. Hiring foreign workers (and not making them citizens and integrating them into the US) and leaving US workers unemployed and incapable of performing necessary jobs, as well as leaving US-based job functions dependent on foreign citizens, is an undesirable situation for the US and its citizens.
Anything that remedies the situation by training US citizens for US jobs is good for citizens and the country alike. A good clue to this is the fact that very few (if any) other countries have systems in place to displace their own citizens' jobs and deliberately sell out their country's knowledge and skill to foreign interests. Hell... if the whole situation didn't primarily benefit the extremely wealthy, shutting it down in the name of national security would be an easy sell.
Without the public key you can't verify the revocation signature, but I see your point. The revocation signature is only of interest to someone who already has a copy of the public key and the presence of an (assumed to be verified by the keyserver) revocation signature is enough to dissuade people from attempting to obtain and use a revoked public key. Retaining both parts allows for others to verify the revocation and limit the damage caused by a malicious keyserver, so there are arguments in favor of a completely open and transparent system (that only adds and never deletes information).
Maybe it currently just comes down to implementation. The revocation signature contains the ID of the key that generated it, but the keyservers are only set up to search for, and return, entire public keys with signatures attached.
PGP Corp's keyserver uses expiration dates and email verification to let abandoned keys slip away. It's not a bad system, really, although it open its own unique possibilities of abuse.
Revoking a keypair shouldn't (and doesn't in most cases) remove a key from the database. If revoking the key removed it from the database, you'd effectively hide the fact that a key was revoked and allow its continued use. You want all of your contacts (current and potential) to know that the particular key has been revoked and is no longer valid.
That's a decent technical solution, but it would require transparent accounting and trusting the phone company. Unless there was some public listing of the average use, it also doesn't allow planning on the users' part. Glass caps are a pretty shitty implementation overall.
As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin. The emphasis on profit alone also leads to too great of a focus on evergreening and low risk projects.
I've worked in a university lab that brought two (while I was there) drugs from design, synthesis, and screening through animal testing for the cost of an R01 ($250k) each. I realize that the clinicals are more expensive, but even $10M/drug is pretty small change compared to posted phama expenses. It's the bloat above the $10M per drug that makes them so expensive.
Hatred for drug companies comes from the (at least perceived) extortionate nature of the business. People feel as if their health is held ransom for another person's profit. Hospitals share the same ill feelings. It's especially potent because the people who profit the most from the whole scheme are already obscenely wealthy. Buying a car doesn't have the same "life or death" aspect to it.
Cut the marketing budget and the executive salary/bonus overhead and set up publicly funded drug trials and the final costs would plummet (even counting the public money... profit and patent monopolies are massive inefficiencies in the drug "market").
Then you can afford to get back on your meds. Win-win!
The solution is to not keep sending sensitive information over email and expecting privacy. Though proper laws would be a move in the right direction, legislative solutions and assumed societal norms just serve to keep people uninformed of the risks of their actions. Not treating unencrypted email as a secure communication medium is really the best choice. Don't talk about your secrets over email and the insecurity of email won't be able to bite you.
[S/MIME, while as broken as and CA based system, is the closest we have to a universal email encryption system. It's a shame that it didn't become more widely accepted, though the rise of webmail has pretty much killed its chances for personal email.]
If you can't figure out how to set up encryption yourself and you can't afford (or figure out how) to buy a solution, then you should abstain from sending secrets over email. That's my point.
Nitpicking the details of the metaphor doesn't make your argument, nor does implying that I lack empathy because I point out others' naivety. The curtain metaphor was meant to highlight that basing your expectation of privacy on others behaving well is naive. Sending secrets or sensitive information by email and expecting it to be private is just as silly as doing secret things in front of an uncurtained window.
Is your argument that encryption is hard so people should just keep sending sensitive information over email and expecting privacy?
If you don't have the technical knowledge to make curtains or the money to buy curtains, is it not naive to expect privacy in your house?
The civilized thing to do is to not be looking in other people's windows, but the reasonable man doesn't offload all of the responsibility for his privacy (or safety or wellbeing or...) onto others. Taking no responsibility for your affairs and depending entirely on others to defend your rights is demonstrably foolish.
Both technical knowledge and money can be acquired, and people acquire them all of the time to handle other aspects of life that matter to them. If privacy matters to someone, then they can apply that technique to privacy as well.
After a bit of skimming, I couldn't really determine if this is a standalone device or something that depends on some creepy third party who will abandon it at some point? The processing demands seem a little high for a standalone, embedded processor.
If you use their web interface, they will store your password on their servers. Be aware of that.
Also, your account password is the the key used to encrypt your data (easy to verify: accessing your data on a new device only requires your account password). They use PDKDF2, which expands the password into a larger key, but (obviously) doesn't add any entropy to that already present in the password. Choose your password wisely.
That password is also used to access the billing, etc web interface, so they do keep at least a hashed copy of your password on their servers.
As with any closed source and opaque solution, you shouldn't depend in any way on unverifiable claims. They could now, or at any time in the future, store your passwords. You're better off handling your own security than trusting magic black boxes.
The Amish don't reject technology so much as they reject being dependent on outsiders. This has historically meant a limited use of technology, but the main beef isn't with technology itself.
Consistent and shared definitions are essential for meaningful debate and discussion. Otherwise you end up with discussions like, basically, every thread in this entire story, where everybody is misunderstanding everybody else because everybody is using their own unique definitions.
Ideally, we'd define all of the essential terms before we start the discussion, but the threads invariable devolve into arguments about who's definition is correct anyway.
The entire gist of my comments is that everybody matters and no group of people should be thrown under the bus for any other group. I know that's not as PC as saying that Americans, white males, or your oppressors de jour don't matter and that the only way to make the world a better place is to cut them down, but you're letting your need to fit my argument into a racist context keep you from understanding what I'm actually saying.
Globalism and offshoring, the way it is currently implemented, is not a process that is making the world a more equal and fair place. Those benefitting the most from the current setup are the rich white Americans you despise so much (in fact, the richest and whitest of the lot). The fortunes they accumulate have historically been spent on directly oppressing and subjugating the poor brown people you pretend to care about (and not through their vague "privilege", but through actual East India Company style incursions into their land).
I'm not an isolationist or some jingoist "they took our jobs" guy. I'm not even white. I'm interested in an ideal solution that has a more solid chance of a long-term successful outcome. If you could at least temper your need to see everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of monster, maybe you could participate in finding solutions to our world's problems. We need fewer closed-minded, my-way-or-the-highway ideologues and more people capable of rational, non-histrionic discussion. Would you care to join us?
Is that how you signal that you're done with this discussion and you just want me to shut up? You're not even arguing against anything I said at this point. Nowhere in any of my posts did I even imply that, but you've got to shoehorn that card in don't you?
Please come back when you have something intelligent to add to this discussion. I didn't agree with you, but your posts were rational up to this point.
Lower costs for products generally aren't of the same order as lower costs of production, and this doesn't help someone whose income has been significantly slashed. While over half of Americans may own stock, stock ownership only represents a source of income for a tiny fraction of them. Most of the owned stock is held by a small number of people. The "over half" statistic also counts participation in retirement funds, which obviously do not offset a lack of income before retirement age. The lack of income before retirement age also halts further contribution to retirement funds and limits their potential for useful growth. The largest beneficiary of the current trend is indeed some "rich guy somewhere".
How do we race toward middle class standards for all by cutting middle class jobs in first world countries and simultaneously concentrating the wealth of those countries in fewer hands?
I'm aware of the differences in the context of the wages and I'm completely sympathetic to the plight of those living in abject poverty. What I don't agree with is the current method of "equalization", since it is unnecessarily destructive to the first world middle and working classes while also further increasing global wealth disparity. The social and safety nets in the first world depend on tax paying workers in those countries, so the long term prospects for the first world counties become more bleak as/if unemployment rises. The resources exist to bring everybody's lifestyle up to the level of the first world middle class, they're just poorly distributed. Equalizing almost everybody's lifestyle to just above abject poverty is a non-optimal solution.
There are other methods to achieve this uplifting effect that are truly "equalizing" across the entire range of incomes and not as destructive to to the first world middle and working classes. Avoiding participation in labor arbitration and encouraging the growth of local economies is a more ideal solution. Depending on a richer country for handouts (that they will certainly withhold when your standard of living increases) is short-term zero-sum thinking.
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I know that this is a troll, and I usually don't respond to stuff like this, but this is a good example of the thinking that permeates much of academia. The idea crudely presented in the post above is that if I'm not deeply offended by the book and 100% behind some goofy letter to the editor or petition or other feel-good measure, then I must be a racist Republican, incapable of thinking and fueled by propaganda. It's the exact same mindset that Bush's, "You're either with us, or against us," comes from. Logic and reason are meaningless, I'm either on the team or I'm a dehumanized enemy.
It's why I unconsciously started my initial comment by stating my personal disagreement with the book (which is genuine), even though that fact is tangential to my entire argument. If I weigh in on some news here at the University without first explicitly stating that I'm not a [racist|sexist|whateverist], the focus of any dissenting comment shifts from what I actually say to assumptions about my politics because I'm not parroting the right talking points.
Who the fuck are you to say which response is correct?
A scientist, who realizes that science is based on reason and not emotion.
This response is covered in Science (though submitted to the NYTimes as a book review) and signed by scientists who are making an "argument" from authority and by consensus. The letter starts, "As scientists..." and then makes an unsupported argument that their work was misused. It concludes by assuming that their "full agreement", by itself and without any actual arguments, carries any weight at all.
By what criteria is that a correct response in any way besides as a feel-good statement? What exactly does being offended do to advance science and human knowledge?
While I don't agree with this guy's conclusions myself, this type of hyper-PC bullshit storm is why being in academia is so obnoxious. Science should be determined by the evidence available and the best interpretation of it at the time, not by people's feelings or politics.
Secondly, someone citing your work doesn't mean you agree with their conclusions (or especially their politics). The correct response, if you care enough, is to follow up by pointing out where their interpretation falls short. The incorrect response is to write some whiny letter crying about how seemingly racist conclusions were drawn from your publications and it deeply offends you.
I mean, come on: "We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures." What a pathetic retort. But I bet they feel better now, and that's all that really matters.
It's one reason why I can't rally behind Phil Zimmerman, as much as I like PGP and appreciate much of what he's done. His insistence on keeping security software secretive and closed source, while seeming to understand the concept of trust, is baffling.
That it's an undesirable situation is the point. The availability of H1B workers is a construct of US laws and the point of US laws should be to benefit the citizens of the US and the country itself. Hiring foreign workers (and not making them citizens and integrating them into the US) and leaving US workers unemployed and incapable of performing necessary jobs, as well as leaving US-based job functions dependent on foreign citizens, is an undesirable situation for the US and its citizens.
Anything that remedies the situation by training US citizens for US jobs is good for citizens and the country alike. A good clue to this is the fact that very few (if any) other countries have systems in place to displace their own citizens' jobs and deliberately sell out their country's knowledge and skill to foreign interests. Hell... if the whole situation didn't primarily benefit the extremely wealthy, shutting it down in the name of national security would be an easy sell.
Without the public key you can't verify the revocation signature, but I see your point. The revocation signature is only of interest to someone who already has a copy of the public key and the presence of an (assumed to be verified by the keyserver) revocation signature is enough to dissuade people from attempting to obtain and use a revoked public key. Retaining both parts allows for others to verify the revocation and limit the damage caused by a malicious keyserver, so there are arguments in favor of a completely open and transparent system (that only adds and never deletes information).
Maybe it currently just comes down to implementation. The revocation signature contains the ID of the key that generated it, but the keyservers are only set up to search for, and return, entire public keys with signatures attached.
PGP Corp's keyserver uses expiration dates and email verification to let abandoned keys slip away. It's not a bad system, really, although it open its own unique possibilities of abuse.
Revoking a keypair shouldn't (and doesn't in most cases) remove a key from the database. If revoking the key removed it from the database, you'd effectively hide the fact that a key was revoked and allow its continued use. You want all of your contacts (current and potential) to know that the particular key has been revoked and is no longer valid.
That's a decent technical solution, but it would require transparent accounting and trusting the phone company. Unless there was some public listing of the average use, it also doesn't allow planning on the users' part. Glass caps are a pretty shitty implementation overall.
As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin. The emphasis on profit alone also leads to too great of a focus on evergreening and low risk projects.
I've worked in a university lab that brought two (while I was there) drugs from design, synthesis, and screening through animal testing for the cost of an R01 ($250k) each. I realize that the clinicals are more expensive, but even $10M/drug is pretty small change compared to posted phama expenses. It's the bloat above the $10M per drug that makes them so expensive.
Hatred for drug companies comes from the (at least perceived) extortionate nature of the business. People feel as if their health is held ransom for another person's profit. Hospitals share the same ill feelings. It's especially potent because the people who profit the most from the whole scheme are already obscenely wealthy. Buying a car doesn't have the same "life or death" aspect to it.
Cut the marketing budget and the executive salary/bonus overhead and set up publicly funded drug trials and the final costs would plummet (even counting the public money... profit and patent monopolies are massive inefficiencies in the drug "market").
Then you can afford to get back on your meds. Win-win!
Here's the original post on Sternlab (from 2008). The "Ski Mask for Eating a Sandwich" is awesome. I think I need one of those first!
The solution is to not keep sending sensitive information over email and expecting privacy. Though proper laws would be a move in the right direction, legislative solutions and assumed societal norms just serve to keep people uninformed of the risks of their actions. Not treating unencrypted email as a secure communication medium is really the best choice. Don't talk about your secrets over email and the insecurity of email won't be able to bite you.
[S/MIME, while as broken as and CA based system, is the closest we have to a universal email encryption system. It's a shame that it didn't become more widely accepted, though the rise of webmail has pretty much killed its chances for personal email.]
If you can't figure out how to set up encryption yourself and you can't afford (or figure out how) to buy a solution, then you should abstain from sending secrets over email. That's my point.
Nitpicking the details of the metaphor doesn't make your argument, nor does implying that I lack empathy because I point out others' naivety. The curtain metaphor was meant to highlight that basing your expectation of privacy on others behaving well is naive. Sending secrets or sensitive information by email and expecting it to be private is just as silly as doing secret things in front of an uncurtained window.
Is your argument that encryption is hard so people should just keep sending sensitive information over email and expecting privacy?
If you don't have the technical knowledge to make curtains or the money to buy curtains, is it not naive to expect privacy in your house?
The civilized thing to do is to not be looking in other people's windows, but the reasonable man doesn't offload all of the responsibility for his privacy (or safety or wellbeing or...) onto others. Taking no responsibility for your affairs and depending entirely on others to defend your rights is demonstrably foolish.
Both technical knowledge and money can be acquired, and people acquire them all of the time to handle other aspects of life that matter to them. If privacy matters to someone, then they can apply that technique to privacy as well.
After a bit of skimming, I couldn't really determine if this is a standalone device or something that depends on some creepy third party who will abandon it at some point? The processing demands seem a little high for a standalone, embedded processor.
Viri, the plural of vir (man), means 'men'.
Just move your money (and data) to SpiderOak and be happy: good client-side crypto can be done properly.
And you're basing that on what, exactly? Marketing claims. And in reply to a post about how marketing claims ended up not being true in iDrive's case.
If you use their web interface, they will store your password on their servers. Be aware of that.
Also, your account password is the the key used to encrypt your data (easy to verify: accessing your data on a new device only requires your account password). They use PDKDF2, which expands the password into a larger key, but (obviously) doesn't add any entropy to that already present in the password. Choose your password wisely.
That password is also used to access the billing, etc web interface, so they do keep at least a hashed copy of your password on their servers.
As with any closed source and opaque solution, you shouldn't depend in any way on unverifiable claims. They could now, or at any time in the future, store your passwords. You're better off handling your own security than trusting magic black boxes.
The Amish don't reject technology so much as they reject being dependent on outsiders. This has historically meant a limited use of technology, but the main beef isn't with technology itself.
Consistent and shared definitions are essential for meaningful debate and discussion. Otherwise you end up with discussions like, basically, every thread in this entire story, where everybody is misunderstanding everybody else because everybody is using their own unique definitions.
Ideally, we'd define all of the essential terms before we start the discussion, but the threads invariable devolve into arguments about who's definition is correct anyway.
The entire gist of my comments is that everybody matters and no group of people should be thrown under the bus for any other group. I know that's not as PC as saying that Americans, white males, or your oppressors de jour don't matter and that the only way to make the world a better place is to cut them down, but you're letting your need to fit my argument into a racist context keep you from understanding what I'm actually saying.
Globalism and offshoring, the way it is currently implemented, is not a process that is making the world a more equal and fair place. Those benefitting the most from the current setup are the rich white Americans you despise so much (in fact, the richest and whitest of the lot). The fortunes they accumulate have historically been spent on directly oppressing and subjugating the poor brown people you pretend to care about (and not through their vague "privilege", but through actual East India Company style incursions into their land).
I'm not an isolationist or some jingoist "they took our jobs" guy. I'm not even white. I'm interested in an ideal solution that has a more solid chance of a long-term successful outcome. If you could at least temper your need to see everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of monster, maybe you could participate in finding solutions to our world's problems. We need fewer closed-minded, my-way-or-the-highway ideologues and more people capable of rational, non-histrionic discussion. Would you care to join us?
Oh, come now.
Is that how you signal that you're done with this discussion and you just want me to shut up? You're not even arguing against anything I said at this point. Nowhere in any of my posts did I even imply that, but you've got to shoehorn that card in don't you?
Please come back when you have something intelligent to add to this discussion. I didn't agree with you, but your posts were rational up to this point.
Lower costs for products generally aren't of the same order as lower costs of production, and this doesn't help someone whose income has been significantly slashed. While over half of Americans may own stock, stock ownership only represents a source of income for a tiny fraction of them. Most of the owned stock is held by a small number of people. The "over half" statistic also counts participation in retirement funds, which obviously do not offset a lack of income before retirement age. The lack of income before retirement age also halts further contribution to retirement funds and limits their potential for useful growth. The largest beneficiary of the current trend is indeed some "rich guy somewhere".
How do we race toward middle class standards for all by cutting middle class jobs in first world countries and simultaneously concentrating the wealth of those countries in fewer hands?
I'm aware of the differences in the context of the wages and I'm completely sympathetic to the plight of those living in abject poverty. What I don't agree with is the current method of "equalization", since it is unnecessarily destructive to the first world middle and working classes while also further increasing global wealth disparity. The social and safety nets in the first world depend on tax paying workers in those countries, so the long term prospects for the first world counties become more bleak as/if unemployment rises. The resources exist to bring everybody's lifestyle up to the level of the first world middle class, they're just poorly distributed. Equalizing almost everybody's lifestyle to just above abject poverty is a non-optimal solution.
There are other methods to achieve this uplifting effect that are truly "equalizing" across the entire range of incomes and not as destructive to to the first world middle and working classes. Avoiding participation in labor arbitration and encouraging the growth of local economies is a more ideal solution. Depending on a richer country for handouts (that they will certainly withhold when your standard of living increases) is short-term zero-sum thinking.